Thread: Darkmatters' Art Gallery

A few more dug out of the old boxes:

Love the first one, in the last post! Great work!

Thanks O - that's definitely one of my best. I wish I could work in color as well as in pencil.

Oh, and I just realized people might have missed the big dump of color drawings I made at the end of page one (because immediately after that I did the sketchbook scans dump that started page 2). That includes some of my best color work to date in case anyone's interested.

Man, I love going back through all these old drawings! It really brings back the time when I did them, and I had completely forgotten about a bunch of them. My goal for right now is to try to bring my drawing skills back up to where they used to be, then I get serious about working with color. So far this little burst of drawing and digi-painting is just to get me back into it, because the best artists are the ones who work every day and have been for years - when you stop you really get rusty.

Ah crap!! I think I killed the thread! Like an idiot I went and moved all my pics on Photobucket into a new folder, so people cn just browse through it if they want without all my other pics being in it as well, and I forgot that was gonna make all the pics disappear here in the thread. Derp!! I think I'll re-create the thread or at least an abbreviated version of it, but meanwhile here's a link to the whole folder: Art Dump. (hope that works, I've never tried this before)

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

Ah crap!! I think I killed the thread! Like an idiot I went and moved all my pics on Photobucket into a new folder, so people cn just browse through it if they want without all my other pics being in it as well, and I forgot that was gonna make all the pics disappear here in the thread. Derp!! I think I'll re-create the thread or at least an abbreviated version of it, but meanwhile here's a link to the whole folder: Art Dump. (hope that works, I've never tried this before)

You could probably just edit your posts and re-link the pictures, but that might take a little time.

Lol I just tried that, but it won't let me edit the posts after a certain amount of time - I think it was 144 minutes or something.

It's actually 1440 - which is like over 100 hours I think. Thank you for LYING pop-up message!!

They're BAAAAAAA--AAAAAAAAACK!!

It was simple - I just moved all the pics back to the folder they were originally in - didn't occur to me that would work, but that's all it took.

Anywho - a couple more that I scanned and did a little digital work on:


Pencil and oil pastel on paper, finished digitally


Pencil and oil paint on paper, finished digitally

Is it me, or does the second one look like Zhaylin (her avatar)??

The headgear and facial composition (at least the forehead) looks similar. Anyway, glad those pics are up again!


Also, I noticed you used some violet colors and blues, etc. to really pop out the skin color and make it stand out. I'm currently trying to get used to coloring digitally (since I usually do grayscale first and then do color). However, it seems that the tutorials I read on several forums and websites that talked about skin led to that same conclusion that you did really well on.

I like both of their facial expressions! Nice stuff as always Darkmatters!


Oil pastel? It almost looks like watercolor to me, but it's been a while since I knew the difference from my Art class in high school.

It does look a lot like Zhaylin, doesn't it? Weird thing is, I drew it before I was ever on DV. It's actually a still of Julia Stiles from Save the Last Dance.

I love oil pastels - I have a huge wooden box of Cray Pas Specialist, little square oil pastels. It was a way of transitioning into color for me, it's easy to look in the box and see what color you need whereas it's a lot harder to just imagine it out of nothing. There are so many ways to use oil pastel - I like to start by doing a pencil drawing and sealing it with three or four coats of Krylon Matte Finish so it won't smear (needs to be at least three coats, but if you go too thick it gets a frosted look that screws up the drawing), then just lightly scribble some colors in and use a paper towel with some Turpenoid on it to rub it all around - it gives it a nice watercolor wash look and is very transparent, you can still see the drawing clearly. Then you can start to build up more opaque layers of oil pastel over that (or scan it and take it to photoshop). Both oil pastels and oil paint are great to use on paper because oil doesn't make paper buckle and wrinkle the way water does - you can do this on regular sketchbook paper. The only problem is the drawings will self destruct in like 40 or 50 years - the oil slowly destroys the fibers and makes it turn yellow and fall apart. But I did some oil paint on paper work 20 years ago that still looks perfect - so far anyway. I guess it'll outlast me.

Oh, and another exciting thing about using oil pastels with pencil - even after you've got the oil pastel on pretty thick you can come in with a really soft dark pencil (like a 6B or 9B) and do your darkest (black) shading - it blends into the oil pastel. A pencil point allows you to get good sharp edges and pinpoint accuracy, which otherwise is almost impossible in oil pastels. Oh man, now you've got me wanting to do a demo on how I work like this..

And yeah, you really do need to cool off your fleshtones with some blue colors, ranging into greens and purples. Otherwise the flesh colors are too 'hot', and end up looking too pink. I still need to do more cooling off on the Julia Stiles one. I'm still struggling with putting blues and purples into my fleshtones - it just feels so wrong! Like it's going to mess everything up. Though I don't have much trouble using purples in shadows - I like to use what's called spectral shift - if you look at the colors in a spectrum the light colors start with yellow (or white if you want to get really technical) and then orange, red and into purple and then blue. That's how I grade the light and shadow colors in my flesh tones.

Just made up an alternate version. It's Cornflower blue..

I like the cornflower blue one even better, though I did like the original one.

Thanks Joanna - I actually like it better too - even though in the movie she was wearing a sort of orange-ish brown. It's too close to her skin colors and makes it all look pretty bland - the blue helps to balance out the colors a bit.

Ok, I did that just playing around at first, but I really do like the way it looks, so now I'm getting serious with it.



It can be super tempting to go too far with adjusting contrast and saturation etc - it makes certain parts of the painting look great, but meanwhile it's screwing up other parts. I think I was looking mostly at the background before while adjusting contrast etc, and didn't notice how it had overcranked the darks on the skin tones and a few other things. Now it looks much better - but I'm a bit bothered by the dark outlines.

Is the background too much now, and did I crop off too much? I think so (on both) - it's weird, it can take a while to really see what you've done and how well it's working. But fear not - I have the power of the mighty Undo button!

I think it looks great.

(Big fan of Julia Stiles, too. What a cutie.)

Did you take art classes? If not you should consider it, since you have strong potential and theres also a very unique style shining through your artwork, which is so goddarn important for artists! I really loved them all, and it looks like your stronger in character design? I would love to see some more scenery though, like that one with the four chairs and that balloon lamp That pic had such an intense atmosphere to it.

I just can repeat myself here: "Please do more"

Probably one of the most useless things I've done is take art classes at the local community college - like most schools since around WW2 they refuse to teach technique - in fact quite literally the instructors will just walk around the room with hands clasped studiously behind their backs repeating "you learn to draw by drawing" or "you learn to paint by painting" (depending on which class you're in). I was already too advanced for those classes when I enrolled, and my teacher even said as much - to get really good instruction you need to be in a very expensive school. Or just buy a lot of books and watch a lot of tutorials. In the end what I paid for was just a place to sit with other people and make art, but the critique sessions and a few random things I picked up from different people were valuable. But I think I literally learned more in the school's library after class than in it.

Heh - the one with the four chairs and the balloon lamp (actually a Japanese paper lantern) was my mom's dining room. I tried to take pictures of it from that perspective, but most of it was hidden behind the wall (the vertical line I drew) and a lot of huge plants behind the sliding glass door, so I had to stand outside on the deck and draw it, stepping from side to side to see what's there and then correcting for perspective error in the drawing. I'm really glad I draw a lot of stuff from my actual life, because they bring the memories back in some ways better than photographs, which capture the brute physical facts but often not the feeling or the memory very well. A drawing or painting captures the artist's experience.

"Please do more" - you got it!! And thank you.

I *think* its done! Which would make it my first successfully completed painting. Although technically it's more of a drawing/painting hybrid, because I worked hard to keep the pencil drawing fully visible and to retain its characteristics. But still I'm calling it my first finished painting. Though I can almost guarantee there will be tweaking and fiddling over the next few days.

** And already I'm seeing things I need to work on a bit more..

This one's done - a much looser sketchier piece than the last:



Sorry for posting so many in-progress images with only slight changes each time - I really need to stop doing that!

I said a few posts back that I wanted to do a demo on my technique for doing an oil pastel wash drawing, and it just so happens I got in a couple of new drawing pads and wanted to try one of them out, so I decided to go ahead and do it last night. Here's a drawing I cranked out - I did this loose and modern-style partly because it's quicker but also I like working like this sometimes:



This one and the 2 at the end were done on the scanner, the rest I just shot on a digital camera, that's why the quality of them is pretty poor. But it's good enough to demonstrate the steps.



Here I've sealed the pencil drawing with 3 good heavy coats of Krylon Matte Finish spray. It also helps to use a fairly hard pencil - otherwise the next step can really smear up the graphite and make a big mess of it.

I picked 2 oil pastels, both pretty unsaturated earth tones - one a light brown and the other a darkish yellow - this creates the overall tone for the drawing. This technique is actually very similar to techniques used by artists from at least the Renaissance if not earlier - though usually they'd do the initial drawing on paper that was already toned in a light flesh color or some light neutral color like grey or green. Not having any such toned paper I decided to tone it myself.

It's been a long time since I did this, and I had forgotten you really need to keep your scribbly lines pretty close together to avoid what you can see below - the lines didn't completely 'melt' and you can still see some of them in places.



All I did here was to fold over a paper towel 3 or 4 times, hold it tightly over the opening of my turpenoid can, and tip it. Then I took the moistened paper towel and scrubbed rather vigorously all over, going against the grain of the lines and trying to make them disappear. Turpenoid is an oil painting medium and bush cleaner - it's essentially a far less toxic version of turpentine with almost no odor.



Here I picked a darker brown and laid in the hair color. This one was burnt umber, a classic earth tone, and it melts into the turpenoid a lot easier than the other colors I've used so far.



When you scrub it down it creates a really soft beautiful effect. Wish all the colors would do that!



Used some more burnt umber to scrub shading into the background in places and also certain parts of the face/hand. It gives it all a nice look and starts to create some shading. I also decided to lighten up the hair a bit and let more of the paper's texture show through.



Now it's almost finished. Did some more shading on the skin with a sort of orange color, then some highlights with white and a few little touches of color here and there. It's a slight variation on the three-tone drawing system used by the old masters, only I deviated from the strict three color rule and used a little more color. But I did most of the work only with a dark and a white on the toned ground, which is a great way to learn abut the basics of painting or realistic fully-shaded drawing technique. In case your wondering, at this point I didn't like the pale pencil lines so I took a softer pencil (a 2B) and drew right over them. Once you've got some wax on the surface of the drawing (oil pastels are in a wax base - they're really just like extra-soft crayons) the pencil really glides smoothy and makes very dark marks very easily. I couldn't believe I was able to go over all the lines with almost no screw-ups! Got lucky on that one. Oh, and for this kind of line quality you have to hold the pencil 'underhand' - not the way you would when writing, and use big arcing motions of the entire arm to draw.



Finished up with some pale green. The window behind her is a classic example of overpainting - where you have the drawing on a toned ground and then come in at the end with a new color representing bright glaring light and paint opaquely right over the darker colors. It would look a lot better if the drawing was overall darker and if the green was brighter.

It was hard to learn to stop 'coloring inside the lines' - it actually looks a lot better if you leave gaps to show the underlying colors so people can see the technique and the simplicity of it. Some people may prefer the step before the last one - when it still looked pretty realistic. The green in the shadows gives it a much more modern look.

The original looks much better than the reproduction does - a transparent art medium (like an oil pastel wash) has a nice glow to it and the colors blend beautifully in a way that can't be captured by a photograph or scanner. In the reproductions colors look harsh and dark and gritty - whites and other colors seem to have hard outlines around them. None of this is there when you look at the original. It makes it frustrating - I can't really show what my work looks like online or in any way unless people want to come over and see the originals..

Green Window - pencil, charcoal and oil pastel on paper - 11 x 14

It's done (tentatively, as always). I decided I really didn't like the green on her face, and I always have the pic of it from above, so I scraped it off as well as I could. That's one of the fun techniques with oil pastels, especially in the later stages when you're putting it on thick over top of the wash drawing. I have a nifty little tool called a burnisher (seen below) that I keep in the box with the cray-pas because its so amazingly useful when working with them.



These things are sold through the MicroMark website as a burnisher, for burnishing down the edges of masking tape and similar type stuff - they also make great sculpting tools and excellent oil pastel tools. The end that's close to the camera, with the red wax on it, is a little spoon shape - the back side of it is for burnishing and smoothing things down, but turned up like this it's good for scraping off some color from a stick of oil pastel. Once you've got a little glob of colored wax you can sort of place it oh so carefully right where you need an accent and then burnish it down to make it permanent - it becomes like a thick little glob of paint there, totally opaque. I used this trick to put the highlights in her eyes and a few other things. The other end of the burnisher is a little blade (not sharp really) that I use to scrape off unwanted wax, like the green on her face.

I discovered charcoal is excellent for making dark parts (the wall behind her). Just be sure to always blow off any loose charcoal dust carefully before it gets stuck in the wax anywhere and makes a nuisance of itself. Then you need to rub over it to sort of blend it down into the wax.

You can manipulate the wax in all sorts of ways - to finish this one up I was rubbing with my fingers, scrubbing with paper towels, using the point or edge of the scraper to remove tiny little dots of wax that just didn't look right (it's easy to get those when working with something as messy as cray-pas).

Ok, well that about covers it, now to go see what the hell my dog is barking at outside...

these are good man, hope you're still drawing. are these from references?
i looked through your puppet theatre too- nice, and wow some of the links of masterworks you posted were hypnotically dark and great.. happy to be exposed to more stop frame art.

Thank ya kindly!! Really appreciate it coming form an artist whose work I admire.

Most of these were from reference, except for the ones back at the beginning - the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser ones. I did sort of use references for their faces, but only very loosely - as in, look at picture and get it in my head, then put it away and start working. Everything else on those paintings was done without. But yeah, other than that, the rest of these were from reference.

Haven't done any more since my last post here - I tend to go through phases where I'm intensely into something, and then suddenly can't stand it anymore and need to get away from it for a while. Lol, in fact that's why I started doing the digital painting - because I needed to get away from the animation for a while.

:]
very energetic lines for references and it should be, no good to get over swamped with the details if you're capturing movement and depth and so on. that disregard blows the stress to achieve perfection wide open, as much as the technical bones do to the human body.
agree'd, sometimes you've got to step away from what you're doing for a while so later you can see the bigger picture. the whole process is worth it in the end.. even if within you feel like bashing your brains out the whole way through ha ha ha ha- damn.

Loving it, man. Great work on the new piece.